…about me, Linux and OpenSource

Yet another advertisement for openSUSE Conference 2011. Something I’ll be participating in as well. But this time, all the glory belongs to Manu Gupta. I’ll be just helping out. We will have together presentation about SaX3. Have you already heard about SaX3? If not,continue reading
SaX2 was X configuration tool. It was using xorg.conf file and it allowed people to set various X properties in GUI. It was a user friendly way how to set up Xorg. But X developers made automatic configuration much better and xorg.conf file obsolete. They replaced it with something much better – configuration directory xorg.conf.d. You can place just snippets of original xorg.conf file in there to override some properties. It’s much better, but unfortunately it also made SaX2 obsolete. And even though automatic configuration is great, there still people that want to tweak just a few details. These people missed SaX2. One of the GSoC projects was to create SaX3 that will be aware of xorg.conf.d directory, respect it and would create just the necessary snippets. So your X configuration will stay as simple as possible, but you’ll also have possibility to configure it easily from GUI.
Manu started working on this project. He had to learn a lot of new things, but he put a lot of effort into that and in the end, there is completely new SaX3. It uses libyui for GUI toolkits abstraction. It is able to run as Qt, GTK or even ncurses application. It uses Augeas to parse xorg.conf.d files and during the summer even the Augeas Xorg lens was improved to support things that were needed. During the SaX3 talk, you will learn, what SaX3 can do for you, how it works and also a little bit about interesting technologies beneath.
If you are eager to see, what it already can do, you can check Manu’s blog about SaX3 and especially Get your hand dirty post